We recently published a paper in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution on the origin and taxonomy of the Inaccessible Island Rail Atlantisia rogersi. The paper is available, with free access to anyone, until December 7, via this link. I summarized our findings in a Twitter thread, that I will share here. Photos, where nothing else is stated: Peter G. Ryan.

Inaccessible Island is half-way between Africa & South America, but when physician Percy Lowe described the species in the 1920s, he suggested that its ancestors were also flightless, and that they had colonized Inaccessible by foot on land ridges! #birds #ornithology pic.twitter.com/wbGvZIFgOl

— Martin Stervander (@nesospiza) October 18, 2018

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In June, I participated in the excellent workshop for Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics, generously supported by the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). During a lecture Brian O’Meara mentioned Richard Conniff’s the Wall of the Dead, or the Memorial of Fallen Naturalists, and I just couldn’t let go of it. Reading the entries at the Wall of the Dead, I started wondering if certain fields of study were over-represented. It turned out that Talia Yuki Moore was also wondering things, and would like to draw conclusions from the tragic incidents in order to prevent future field work casualties.

We thus joined efforts, and contacted Richard Conniff about analyzing the material to better understand the circumstances and causes of scientist mortality during fieldwork. However, Conniff’s Wall of the Dead certainly is not exhaustive, and we are now therefore making a call for more information. Do you know of someone who is missing from this list? If so, please add their information to our database. Your contribution will help establish new safety standards for fieldwork and memorialize the contributions of those who gave their lives to further our understanding of the natural world.

Please contribute your information to our form, where you can also read more about the study, which is an IRB exempt study registered with the University of Michigan Institutional Review Board (#HUM00149801). We will forward all new entries to Richard Conniff’s Wall of the Dead. We will also account for all entries in upcoming publications, whether they will be included in our analyses or not (depending on whether they match certain criteria).

Also, please forward this call for information widely. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me or Talia (taliaym /at umich.edu).

A new, excellent, initiative to increase visibility for LGBT+ scientists is the 500 Queer Scientists campaign. I gladly contributed my story (or, well, at some point I think I should actually account for my story in full – this is a very short version), which was also picked up by the editors of the Advocate Magazine.

How did this happen to a bird researcher from Sweden? Well, evolutionary questions can be addressed in various study systems, and I will make use of the crazy syngnathid fish (seahorses, pipefish, and seadragons) to look into craniofacial development and evolution. I am happy to do this in the Cresko Lab at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon. I started my three-year postdoc project in August 2017.

[This post has been back-dated to reflect reality…]

Our paper on the São Tomé grosbeak, summarized here and on the BOU blog, was finally published in the July issue of Ibis. This has rendered quite some interest in the press, with articles in National Geographic (Spain & Portugal), New Scientist, Science Daily, among many others. See the full list of articles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Swedish, with links to most of them. Surprisingly (?), all this attention means that the short note in Ibis has climbed to the top 0.5% of the most highlighted research outputs that Altmetric tracks!

Google Scholar has released a new feature that lists “Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood The Test of Time”. I am very pleased to see that a paper that I was happy to co-author with late Niclas Jonzén is among the classics, as the fourth most cited publication about birds published in 2006.

In 2005 I published my first ever peer reviewed paper, which was an analysis of long-term bird ringing data from Ottenby Bird Observatory. The 2006 Science paper was, in some sense, triggered or inspired by this work, and here we expanded and used bird ringing data several Scandinavian bird observatories, in combination with data from Capri in Italy. We could show that migratory birds that spend their winter south of the Sahara responded even more strongly to the European winter weather (which determines the progression of the following spring), than did short-distance migrants. So after a cold and dry winter, spring came later, and migratory birds arrived later.

We already knew that the birds arrived later at the Scandinavian breeding grounds, but in this paper, we made use of the data from Capri, as we argued that the arrival to Italy should reflect the departure from sub-Saharan Africa. The rationale for this is that there isn’t much opportunity to spend time between the two regions, as the birds have to cross two major barriers – the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Furthermore, even after accounting for the winter weather, there was a clear trend over time towards earlier arrival, which we argued reflects natural selection for earlier spring migration.

Read the classic paper, the preceding Ottenby paper, or check out Google Scholar’s top list for bird papers.

We have finally published the first piece of the puzzle about the critically endangered São Tomé grosbeak Neospiza concolor in the ornithological journal Ibis. So what is special about the São Tomé grosbeak? Pretty much everything:

• It is among the rarest species on Earth
• It was not seen for over 100 years
• Taxonomists have fought about what kind of bird it really is

In 1888, the Portuguese naturalist Francisco Newton collected a specimen of an unknown bird species on São Tomé. Two years later, he found another two specimens, and with its large size and massive bill it was originally described as a weaver (family Ploceidae). However, not everyone agreed, and there was an argument about whether it was really a weaver or a finch (family Fringillidae). Eventually, most authorities agreed that it was probably a finch, but its affinities were unclear and it was rewarded its own genus, Neospiza – the new finch.

The type specimen is held at the Natural History Museum ornithology collections in Tring, whereas the two others were destroyed in a fire in 1978 at the National Museum of Natural History in Lisbon. After Newton’s initial collections, the São Tomé grosbeak was not sighted again for over 100 years, until it was found by Dave Sergeant three other birders in 1991! Even after its rediscovery, sightings remain very scarce. Until recently, the official population size estimate has been less than 50 individuals, but recent censusing efforts by Ricardo de Lima and colleagues suggest that it might not be just that bad. Continue reading →

I am very happy to announce that last week the Swedish Research Council awarded me a SEK 3,150,000 grant to do a three-year postdoc in the Cresko Lab at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon. I will dive into the world of syngnathid fish and explore the development and the evolution of the snouts of pipefish and seahorses, learning a whole bunch of new methods along the way. I very much look forward to joining Bill and his lab in 2017! I also look forward to seeing the efforts of Bill and colleagues turn into reality, with UO’s recently presented plans for the new Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. Check out the presentation, featuring Bill and others.

As I have mentioned, there are a couple of nice initiatives to increase the diversity in science, and the visibility of that diversity. I am happy to say that I am now featured in a short interview at the LGBT STEM site.

| The original paper may be accessed for free through August 11 2016, using the following link: Stervander et al. 2016 MPE |

A couple of years ago, Alström et al. (2013) revealed that larks (Alaudidae) comprised unusually many examples of both cryptic taxa (whose evolutionary and taxonomic distinctness have gone overlooked, owing to phenotypic similarity to other taxa) and convergent evolution among unrelated species. One striking example of the latter was the species pair White-winged Lark Alauda leucoptera and Mongolian Lark Melanocorypha mongolica (Figure 1, upper panel), which display very similar plumage, and have been assumed to be closely related. Instead, they turned out to be of two different genera, separated since 11 million years ago. Likewise, the two clades which have traditionally formed the genus Calandrella, have been separated for 12 million years, and are not at all each other’s closest relatives, despite superficial similarities (Figure 1 middle panel). Urban Olsson, Per Alström, and others are currently looking closely into the clade which, following their recommendation, is now known as the genus Alaudala. Together with Per and Urban, Ulf Ottosson, Bengt Hansson, and Staffan Bensch, I dived into trying to sort out the phylogenetic relationships of the remaining Calandrella clade.

My curiosity dates back to the early 2000’s, when a small and isolated population of Red-capped Larks C. cinerea was rediscovered close to the Nigerian research institute APLORI, where I have been teaching. The Jos plateau, in central Nigeria, is a curious distribution outlier for this species, which is common in Southern Africa, but has its otherwise most northerly distribution in Congo – over 1,000 km away. Continue reading →